


Kerfuffle with Kuribohs

by thegraeyone



Series: Star Trek AU [2]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Star Trek Fusion, M/M, Not Actually That Romantic, Tribbles (Star Trek), captain yugi on the clock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:40:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26368846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegraeyone/pseuds/thegraeyone
Summary: Stationed at a planet near the neutral zone, the Guardian crew discover a very strange creature.[Part of my Star Trek AU, in which the five year mission actually features them doing their jobs, mostly.]
Relationships: Jounouchi Katsuya | Joey Wheeler/Kaiba Seto
Series: Star Trek AU [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1579024
Comments: 9
Kudos: 16





	Kerfuffle with Kuribohs

**Author's Note:**

> Did you know that today is Star Trek Day? Meanwhile I haven't updatad my AU in months! I decided to take something off the back burner for this and dash it out, and the light hearted adventures of the tribbles is always a good go to. Admittedly a little unpolished thanks to writing it in one go, but I'll forgive myself.
> 
> Based (very loosely) on the Star Trek episode "The Trouble With Tribbles", which features a lot more Klingons and alien espionage than is present here, but really I just wanted to see Seto Kaiba buried in a pile of Kuribohs.

One of the joys of the  _ Guardian _ ’s deep space mission (and arguably its point) was coming across new alien species, from possible allies to the Federation to the wildlife that sprung up on every new planet they came across. And there were times, like now, where they popped up in the strangest of places.

“What,” Joey said, “even are they?”

Yugi passed his First Officer an amused look. Waiting around for K-7’s station manager had turned boring quickly, and a small opportunistic bar sat in the space station’s halls, offering to serve any and every traveler. The space station sat precariously close to Klingon territory, meaning they’d gotten to watch the eclectic clientele. A man calling himself Cyrano Jones had recognized their Starfleet uniforms and had immediately wandered up to talk, revealing all of the exotic wares he brought from every corner of the galaxy. He’d revealed a small round ball of fur, one that was warm in their hands, and purred pleasingly at all times. No mouth, no eyes, and they barely even moved.

“They’re called kuribohs,” Jones said with a beaming smile. He was a practiced salesman. Yugi’d grown up in a game store, and he recognized it immediately. “The greatest little things, perfect for space travel. They’ll eat anything and don’t require a litter box.”

Joey gave him a disbelieving stare. Yugi picked up the creature again. Its purring grew louder, and it trilled on occasion.

“Pretty sure there are regulations against transporting alien pets,” Joey said.

“Well who can say, this close to the neutral zone,” Jones said quickly. “And of course, I could work out some sort of Starfleet discount. Imagine what you could learn from one of these.”

Yugi stood straight as the station manager appeared in the doorway of the bar. Joey did as well, adopting his usual face when dealing with diplomats and officials. When Yugi only hit five feet because of his hair, he appreciated having someone like Joey at his back.

“Come back when you have some time,” Jones promised. “I’m sure I’ve got something to interest you!”

Yugi tried not to laugh as Joey rolled his eyes.

\---

Klingons meant trouble. And the only reason they were interested in K-7 was because of its proximity to Federation space. The station manager wanted them out, but the  _ Guardian  _ couldn’t do much without starting a war. Yugi’d been excited to be chosen as captain of their exploratory mission. Honored, even. He was starting to understand why no one else wanted the headache.

He took a break thinking about the mess to get something from the replicators. He wasn’t surprised to find it partially empty. The ship wasn’t at red alert, but security had picked up with the Klingon presence. But taking up a table were members of his bridge crew. Anzu, Bakura, and Malik sat around the table with their First Officer. Yugi still hadn’t gotten used to seeing Kaiba sitting with them. He sat with a rigid spine, face unreadable as usual, but his eyes were focused on whatever Joey was messing with. As Yugi approached the table, he saw the kuriboh nestled between them. Joey sat straight up when he saw Yugi, folding his hands over the creature.

“In my defense,” Joey said, “the guy was keeping it in his pocket.”

“It’s cute, right?” Anzu scooped it up and pressed it to her cheek. It kept purring. “They are the weirdest little things. Kaiba and me are gonna dissect one.”

Joey elbowed Kaiba, who only held out his hands. His expression remained unchanged as he said, “It’s my duty.”

Anzu continued stroking a finger down the kuriboh’s back and smiled at Yugi. “I do want to borrow it. It’s our mission, right? To document new creatures?”

“I don’t know.” Malik had a chin in his hand, slumped forward on the table. A sour expression curled his lip, but when didn’t it? “It gives me the creeps.”

“Because you don’t have taste,” Joey said. “What do you say, cap? Can we keep him?”

Anzu placed the kuriboh in Yugi’s palm. It purred happily (or unhappily? Impossible to tell), and vibration from its little body felt nice, like holding a purring kitten. Yugi’s grandpa had said no to a dog, a cat, a hamster, a fish. He’d only had the digital pets and video game characters to collect as a kid. Plus, they weren’t wrong. The point was to catalogue alien life.

“I don’t see a problem,” he said.

“I still don’t like it.” Malik wrinkled his nose at the tiny creature. “People always bring in weird lifeforms to these stations and it’s always bad news. You don’t even know what it eats.”

“Everything.” Anzu gestured to the empty trays stacked up together. “It could get sick, and I’m not much of a veterinarian.”

Yugi set it on the table. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess.”

“Not the most practical outlook,” Kaiba suggested.

Joey nudged him again. It barely seemed like a month since any physical interaction between the two of them would end in broken bones, and now Kaiba didn’t protest as Joey lazily slung his limbs around him. Yugi’d noted how close they were sitting together too. They’d been trawling through space for over a year now, and Yugi had prodded his Science Officer to interact with the other crew, treat them as more than coworkers. It was like pulling sharpened, gnashing teeth with a Vulcan, and then, all at once, victory. Of course, that victory went to Joey, but Yugi knew when to take a win.

“What kind of pets do you got on Vulcan?” Joey asked, bumping his shoulder against Kaiba’s. “Trying to think of a  _ logical  _ animal for you.”

“Most people kept sehlats,” he said.

“What’re those?”

“I’ve seen those,” Bakura said. “They mention them in some Vulcan texts. They’re like big teddy bears.”

“With six inch fangs,” Kaiba said serenely.

“Everything I learn about Vulcan explains so much,” Anzu said. 

Yugi shook his head, returning to the replicator. The group continued talking, the kuriboh between them.

\---

Conflict, Yugi had learned the more and more they’d ventured out into new worlds, inevitably came from resources. Sherman’s Planet was a barren rock, but with the introduction of quadro-triticale suddenly the place a stronghold desired by both the Federation and the Empire. The grain was set to be planted and allow the rock to flourish, but the Klingons had their own ideas about what to do with it. Despite their reputation, the Klingons remained peaceful, though certain of their own superiority.

Conflict may start with resources, but after centuries of aggression, grudges, and a firm sense of authority meant many wars were continued out of pure stubborn pride.

He expected the crew to be tense. They were too often next door to disaster, and any incident could start a full fledged war. Yugi found, as his crew settled into the K-7 station, that tense was almost the opposite of the mood. Those granted shore leave at least managed to keep their heads around their Klingon friends. And the ones on board were now overwhelmed by the kuribohs, which had multiplied overnight. Yugi had some awareness of it, seeing the crewmembers sharing them in the dining hall or holding their purring bodies, but it really didn’t hit him until he sat down in his seat and heard it squeak.

“Where do they even come from?” he asked as he became aware of the furry creatures now decorating the bridge. Laid across consoles and crawling along the railings, they were on every corner of the ship. Most of the crew seemed to work around them unbothered.

Anzu had come up to the deck. If there was anything Yugi liked in a crisis, it was someone else to be in a crisis with him.

She held up four cupped in her hands and said, “They’re bisexual.”

“Good for them,” Joey said.

She cut him a glare before continuing on with her findings. “As far as I can tell they’re born pregnant. They eat, and they breed. It’s been three days since we arrived at K-7? I think we’ll have more kuribohs than food by the end of the week.”

“They’re certainly fascinating creatures,” Kaiba said. A pile of them sat on the console where he normally stood, and he stroked one idly with a finger. “The sound they emit seems to have a calming affect on humans. And yet the Klingons hate them.”

Joey eyed him. “What’s the effect on Vulcans?”

“We are, of course, above those baser instincts,” he said and scratched the kuriboh under what might’ve been a chin.

“Okay, well, how do we get rid of them?” Yugi asked. “They’re on everything. How are they getting around?”

“Best guess is the vents,” Joey said. “Tristan’s been complaining about them getting into the machinery. Somehow they’re crawling through.”

“The vents?” Kaiba repeated and looked meaningfully up. “The creatures would likely be in search of food, and the vents would likely lead them to K-7’s storage facilities.”

They all looked at him. He added, helpfully, “Where the grain is being stored.”

Yugi stood sharply to attention. He turned to their Communications Officer and said, “Bakura, will you tell K-7’s station manager we’ll need to open those vaults right away.”

“Is there a problem?” Anzu asked.

“Probably lots of them.” Yugi allowed himself one sigh before setting off to do his job. “I’ll need my Science Officer’s expertise, I think. And Joey, since someone’s going to get mad.”

“It’s only been a few days,” Joey reasoned out loud. “It can’t be that bad.”

It was exactly that bad. The station manager could not open the doors fast enough for the crew, and Yugi sent Kaiba in ahead, since he was so good at breezing past everyone else’s bullheadedness. As Yugi and Joey argued with the station manager, Kaiba opened the overhanging door, releasing a flood of kuribohs that bounced onto the ground like a spoiled child’s stuffed animal net coming loose. Yugi felt a little bad about it as they all turned in shock, and a little worse when Joey breathed in one short sharp laugh that was quickly silenced by Kaiba’s cutting glare.

“I’m going to guess it’s the same in every storage unit,” Joey said as he nudged a few out of the way with his foot.

“These represent a quarter of our grain supply!” the station manager shouted. “It’s been eaten!”

“I think we have a larger issue,” Kaiba said as Joey offered his hands to him. “These kuribohs are dead.”

Joey grimaced at that before giving Kaiba a yank that half-dragged him out of the buried pile. A few more kuribohs fell on top of him. Joey was biting his lip to keep from laughing.

“What killed them?” Yugi asked.

Joey pulled him free with another yank, and he staggered, held upright by their First Officer. He brushed off the indignity as Joey’s eyes went up to the ceiling.

“My guess,” Kaiba said, glaring at Joey, “it’s something in the grain.”

“Fantastic,” Yugi said, clapping his hands together. “We’ll have to grab everything, the grain, the kuribohs, and whatever else we find. We’re getting to the bottom of this.”

“Aye, aye, captain,” Joey said and turned away before he started laughing.

\---

“There’s something in the grain,” Anzu said with certainty as she and Kaiba stood over their work in the medical bay. With added dramatic affect, she finished, “They were poisoned.”

Running around all day had left the crew somewhat exhausted. Joey draped across one of the chairs, legs propped on the arms as Yugi had seated himself on one of the tables. Not very captain-like, but after the arguing with the station manager, who then decided to argue with the Klingons, who then decided to blame everything on the Earthers anyway. Yugi had a headache and was craving something sweet, but the replicators were out of order until the yeoman could properly clear the  _ Guardian _ of the kuriboh menace. It meant officers sweeping big brooms to pile the critters into a single room, until they could figure out what to do about the furry little monsters.

“It’s a Klingon poison,” Kaiba said, coming around the work station to place a hand on the chair Joey swiveled in.

“That means the Klingons did it,” Joey said, wiggling in the chair to sit upright. “Now what?”

Yugi hung his head in his hands. “Accusing the Klingons means opening ourselves up to hostilities. Are you sure?”

“It’s a pretty common form of poison,” Anzu said with a shrug. “If the Klingons meant to be sneaky about it, they didn’t exactly do a great job.”

“It isn’t their usual style,” Joey agreed.

Kaiba’s head tilted as he considered the evidence in front of them. Yugi caught the expression on his face, and he took a breath.

“It comes to mind,” their Science Officer said, “that the Klingons would suffer for the grain not being introduced to Sherman’s Planet. Its value is placed on its ability to grow this grain. Poisoning it, while an aggression against the Federation, does not make the most logical sense.”

They took a moment to absorb the information. Joey leaned back in the chair.

“So it’s not the Klingons,” he said.

Kaiba looked down at him, expression exactly the same as always, and said, “Your powers of observation remain astute.”

“Aw.” Joey grinned at him. “Thanks for the compliment, babe.”

Anzu rolled her eyes. “Can we focus? Someone’s framing them, okay. Easy enough to work with. Who?”

“Well,” Yugi reasoned aloud, “we can start with who has access to those grain cellars. Our security team, Federation officials, and the station manager. He wasn’t pleased to have the Klingons tramping around in his space.”

“It certainly makes Sherman’s Planet less attractive,” Kaiba said.

“If the project fails, then all parties lose interest.” He slipped off the table and fixed his uniform. “It’s a thread to follow at least.”

“Goodie,” Joey said as he stood. “Off to work we go.”

\---

Yugi got a special sort of satisfaction for unraveling the strange set of circumstances that led them to K-7. The station manager’s unmasking between both Federation agents and Klingon soldiers wasn’t particularly exciting or dramatic, and once he confessed to poisoning the grain, the Federation seemed ready to wash their hands of the whole situation anyway. No one really wanted a fight with the Klingons, least of all the people out here. It would be one of those reports that ended in the trash bin of Starfleet’s archives. All that was left were the kuribohs.

“There’s so many of them,” Joey whined as he swept them into a pile in the hull. Yugi worked on the other side of the room. Kaiba watched from a console as Tristan brought in another bucket.

“You’re the one that brought them on board,” Tristan complained and dumped them onto the floor. Yugi smiled as he propped himself back on the wide broom. Probably not a captain’s official duty, but it made for entertaining times anyway.

“I think we’re all good,” he said as he stepped back.

“I’ll inform engineering,” Kaiba said and moved to do just that.

“Lesson learned.” Joey sighed. “Bye, little guys.”

“Where are we teleporting them again?” Tristan asked as they all moved away from the pile.

“Sherman’s Planet is being reclassified,” Yugi said. “As far as Anzu and Kaiba have figured out, it’s the perfect place for the little guys. All the minerals they can eat, and no one to bother.”

“Except Starfleet, if we ever decide to make use of it,” Joey said, leaning on the wall beside Kaiba. “I don’t mind annoying us so much.”

“That much is clear,” Kaiba said and ignored the eye roll that followed. “Engineering is ready.”

They all stood back against the far wall and watched as the mound of kuribohs lit up in technicolor, broken down and repopulated down on the planets surface. The empty room they left behind was filled with the sighs of relief from the crew. They all admired a job well done before Joey slumped his head against Kaiba’s shoulder, and Tristan clapped his hands together.

“That’s that,” he said. “I can’t wait to leave this place.”

“Not the most exciting adventure,” Yugi admitted with his hands on his hips, “but it’s done now.”

“I’m so exhausted.” Joey pressed his face into Kaiba’s sleeve, and the Vulcan didn’t respond, except for a tinge of green at the tips of his pointed ears. “We’re done, right? I can go to sleep now.”

“I think I should help the First Officer to bed,” he said and looked away when Yugi smiled at him.

“Another day tomorrow,” Yugi promised.

“Yeah, yeah,” Joey groaned. “When isn’t it?”

Tristan punched his arm in response, and Joey jolted up before returning in kind. Kaiba shook his head as he followed after the two now jabbing at each other through the halls, and Yugi watched them go with a warm feeling in his chest. No, definitely not the easiest job in the world, but he was happy to do it.

**Author's Note:**

> There's an actual bar fight in this episode and I didn't write Joey punching dudes in the face which really goes to show you the restraint I have as an author.
> 
> I do need to write more of their day to day adventures especially because I have some things cooking that could stand a bit of build up. I'd like to show off more of the crew also. In case you are wondering the current named crew looks like this:
> 
> Yugi Muto, Captain, Commanding Officer  
> Joey Wheeler, Chief Operations Officer, First Officer  
> Seto Kaiba, Chief Science Officer, Second Officer  
> Ryou Bakura, Communications Officer  
> Malik Ishtar, Helm Officer, Weapons Officer  
> Anzu Mazaki, Chief Medical Officer  
> Tristan Taylor, Chief Engineer
> 
> Plenty of room for expansion and spots to place some of my favorite characters. See you, space cowboy!


End file.
